


The poets let a generation down

by cicak



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), due South
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Apocalypse, Cylons, M/M, Reincarnation, spoilers for the whole of Battlestar Galactica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:59:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2785835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray had died in the bombings. Benton was absolutely, completely, 100% sure of that.</p>
<p>(Battlestar Galactica/due South fusion)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The poets let a generation down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LoreleyLuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LoreleyLuna/gifts).



 

There is a wall of photographs in the Galactica’s security room. There isn’t a lot to do, as a security guard, in a ship full of military men and women, and so the wall of photographs, which start out as a overlapping jumble of data and reconnaissance, slowly over time end up perfectly tessellated, with their clipped corners lined up straight as if done with a ruler. An obviously bored security officer spent a whole shift cutting out tiny squares of coloured paper to stick in the gaps so that from far away the wall looks like a temple mosaic. Up close, it is a record of every security photograph, accidental snapshot and posed mug shot of the known humanoid Cylon models.

 

On particularly frustrating days, when everything seems lost, the junior members of the security team throws darts at them.

 

* * *

 

When Benton Fraser was a child growing up on Aquaria, his mother would take him to the weekly government meeting in the town that is the capital merely by virtue of being the largest. Aquaria was a cold planet, sparsely populated, always one of the poorer colonies, but with a fierce history of community engagement and democratic representation. Their government system was collaborative in a way that no other colony could match, and was something his mother was intensely proud of. She came from a politically passionate family, and was determined that her son would inherit her passion for justice and the rule of law. And so, even in the depths of winter, when even the Aquarian population who lived in the capital barely bothered to appear in person, Benton and his mother would get bundled up in all their cold weather gear and go and do their democratic duty. The chairwoman would giggle and wave at him as Benton held up his tiny gloved hand to vote alongside his mother. Sometimes, when the vote was especially one sided, his hand would be counted among those of the grownups.

 

His father was well respected in the Aquarian police force, and for his sins was frequently off planet, drawn to the central courts on Caprica to help deliver justice to the criminals who ran drugs or stole natural resources from the glaciers, thinking that the remote and sparsely populated colony would be an excellent base of operations. Sometimes, his father had to identify the bodies of those who made that mistake at the wrong time of year. Most of the time, he caught them, hauled them back to the tiny, unnamed capital, and took them personally on a transport to the main gaol on Caprica.

 

His mother believed in civic duty, and his father believed in interventionist justice. Their marriage was tragically short, two strong personalities raising a third in the middle of nowhere on a dangerous frontier world. They’d both fought in the first cylon war as young, idealistic recruits as the war was drawing to an end, and believed that society as a construct was something worth fighting for. Even in the corruption of the dying days of the colonies, when Benton himself was an adult and following in his father’s footsteps, when he stood stoically by the side of the heart of the government, he held the burning stone of his Mother’s convictions in his heart.

 

Then of course, the cylons came back, and it all went to hell.

 

* * *

 

After many years of chasing men over glaciers in the family tradition, Benton was requested for a special assignment. The Aquarian ambassador needed protection, officially due to unspecified threats but actually due to some politically very specific ones, and so Benton packed his small bag, and moved from his job on the outer colonies to still be a policeman, but also at the heart of government. The job was what he imagined his parents would have agreed for him in compromise.

 

For historical reasons, the Aquarian ambassador’s residence on Caprica was in Delphi, rather than in Caprica City. This was officially due to the association with the research station based on the glaciers which was staffed mostly from the Delphi University pool of climate scientists. Unofficially, it was because the first ambassador hated the biggest city, and preferred to sneak out and wander round the Delphi Museum on quiet afternoons, and so the tradition stuck.

 

Benton lived in Delphi for four years, first living in Embassy housing, and then moving in with Ray, once their mutual tension turned to lust, love and whispers of forever in the dark. They met because while Benton had billet to enforce both Colonial and local laws, the local laws in question were only Aquarian laws. Being on Caprica, enforcing Caprican law meant partnering with a Caprican policeman, which was how he met Ray.

 

Their relationship built slowly. They were very different people; Ray had occasionally ribbed Benton for his strong backbone, that he was an upstanding member of the Aquarian Police Corps, while Ray himself was a ‘mostly slouched’ member of the Caprican Police at Delphi. However, for all of this, they were well matched as police partners, their methods complementing rather than clashing. Their relationship was the easiest thing that Benton had ever encountered. It was simple - he had burned with lust for Ray from the first day he saw him, slouching with confident ease, skinny and spiked haired and dressed quite unlike any of the other plain-clothes detectives in the CPD. When he found out that Ray had also harboured inappropriate thoughts about the way Benton filled out his uniform, and the way he looked like he wanted so desperately to be touched while keeping himself distant for what Ray called ‘weird Aquarian masochistic reasons’, there was no reason not to touch, and let himself be touched.

 

Ray had died in the bombings. Benton was absolutely, completely, 100% sure of that. They had spoken a few hours before the first bomb had gone off, discussing banal, quotidian things - what Ray was going to pick up for dinner, Ray bitching about the ever increasing pile of dishes that materialised whenever Benton was offworld and Benton good naturedly not-gossiping about the Embassy staff on the transport heading to the Galactica decommissioning ceremony. It was the most normal and unsuspecting of last conversations. It was something he went over and over in his mind for months after the fact.

 

Benton had spoken to the civilian aide before Ray had picked up, so there was no way Ray would have been pretending to be calling from a transport that just happened to be FTL capable and could have jumped away with the fleet. The rational part of him he didn’t give in and put Ray’s face up on the memorial wall, hoping for a sign he was alive somewhere in the fleet. Instead, he lit a candle for Ray’s soul in the privacy of his quarters, and did what he could to guide him to the afterlife. He’d never been much of a religious man, but he visited the Galactica temple often enough, leaving offerings to Athena, Charon and Hades to help Ray’s travel through the afterlife. Athena, to recognise that he represented peace as a policeman, Charon to give him a good seat on the ferry because Ray always got motion sick, and Hades as an old fashioned bribe for the God of the underworld to give mercy to a good man. Sometimes, on dark days, he cried over the candles as they dwindled as time passed, and hoped it would all be enough.

 

Ray liked to pretend to be an oracle, and making grand, insane proclamations about what the future held was his party trick and a running joke between them. These prophesies usually involved food, blow jobs and nights out where he would laugh himself sick over Benton’s bad dancing before taking him in his arms and showing him how it was done. Sometimes he would just whisper future secrets of pseudo-scripture into Benton’s ear late at night after they had worn each other out with their hands and mouths and musculature. ‘I predict I will love you forever’, Ray would growl in his ear. ‘We will be together in the next life, and the next, until the death of the universe prevents it, and even then, heaven will be waiting for us’ as he drags out Benton’s orgasm over the stroke of midnight and into the next day. ‘We are tied together, and always will be’ as he holds Benton’s hands down and thrusts into him with passionate savagery. ‘Even if you lose me, I will come back to you’, with big solemn drunken eyes at the new year’s celebration, before a midnight kiss.  ‘All this has happened before and will do again’, quiet and intimate, at a sun-dappled brunch on one of Delphi’s fashionable streets.

 

* * *

 

The security corps were headquartered on Galactica for conveniences sake, but their remit was to protect the population of the civilian ships in the fleet in a way the military was not bothered with. Their raptor was painted in the bright colours of the 12 colonies rather than the dour military scheme, but it didn’t help with the utter bleakness of the facts of life outside of the Galactica. Understaffed, under-supported and ultimately powerless against the real problems facing the fleet of theft, escalating arguments and the creep of squalor, they were a futile force and seemingly the last thing that the fleet needed. In a place where there were not enough doctors, never really enough food, too much work expected of them and nothing to do in the downtime, the entire fleet seemed clinically depressed.

The military covered the important stuff, but they were too heavy handed for small squabbles. As the civilian government slowly reestablished itself, the security force grew more confident in its remit, but it was small fry, solving only small crimes, establishing the rule of colonial law, enforcing what can be lawful at the end of the world and generally just trying to help out. Benton hunted thieves the way his father’s diaries taught him, with politesse and cunning, following clues and being a calm force for justice, even when he wasn’t sure what justice was, and tried to teach his deputies to do the same.

 

* * *

 

There’s a rumour going round the fleet over games of Triad for the sodden and torn remaining credits from the old days, the fire fuelled by the truth and late night conspiracy theory wireless shows and the truth, that you can’t even kill the cylons. That we throw them out of the airlock, and they just download into new bodies. That they have enormous ships just filled of copies of themselves, empty shells to be filled with endless lives.

 

* * *

 

Benton was coming to the end of his shift when security get a call from Colonial One that the President needs an escort to the Gemenon Traveller. Benton knows the ‘traveller, an overcrowded former cargo vessel but generally not much of a problem for the security teams, so when Billy, the President’s aide rang through requesting security, he almost didn’t volunteer, and instead considered sending one of the junior recruits over for some experience.

However, it is some glimmer of colonial patriotism that makes him think that the President deserves better than a raw recruit who doesn’t understand diplomatic protocol, so he goes himself and instead sends his subordinates to cover his usual patrol.

 

The President is cool and polite when he comes to escort her. Benton had met her briefly back in his old life as liaison, at some university benefit for the Aquarian climate scientists, but she obviously didn’t remember him. She seemed to have taken to her Presidency well in his opinion, with a solemnity that he never would have expected her to have from her previous reputation. She commanded those around her effortlessly, wearing the power of her position like a cape that billows in the wind, securely fastened.

 

Benton followed her closely, her quick movements sandwiched between himself and the other security guard. The people living on the ‘traveller look at them curiously as they escort the President through the ship. Benton stopped to answer a few questions, and so ends up having to jog to catch up with the rest of the party. This meant that there was no time to take in the situation when he gets to the makeshift brig in the bowels of the ‘traveller. It’s loud, with the President shouting and the sound of people trying to get into the room but all he can see is Ray, sopping wet, bloodied and beaten looking intently up at a blonde woman like she contained the multitudes of the universe.

 

The woman turns out to be the indomitable Starbuck, the Lieutenant Thrace whose name echoes through the late night wireless, already infamous throughout the fleet despite the war only being in its infancy. The President commands Thrace away to explain herself, instructing them, her personal guard, to relieve the military forces. It is a tiny, unnoticed act of mutiny, something Benton would normally have challenged as not being in accordance with their special billet from the Commander, but he isn’t exactly thinking with his procedure brain at that moment. After they depart and the President’s shouting has quietened to a muffled yell, Benton volunteers to give the prisoner water and, with a deep breath, lets himself into the cell.

 

It had been just over three and a half weeks since Ray had died, and nearly six weeks since they had last sat together in their apartment, discussing Pyramid and being quietly, unremarkably in love. The man sits there, perfectly still, which is the first sign. He looks exactly like Ray, but at the same time is obviously not Ray. His posture is perfect, though his body is obviously nursing bruises and signs of torture, and his hair is different, though Benton can see how just a few small cuts would bring out what was Ray’s signature haircut, something so obviously stylish and Caprican and when he first met him, completely alien. He is dressed atrociously, the way Ray used to dress when Benton first met him. Its the eyes though, when he opens them and takes in everything Benton is, and then instantly dismisses him, that lets him know that this is not his Ray. His Ray, when he gave him that look, always smiled at the end.

 

The man, this fleshly Cylon, this cold-hearted imposter that wears Ray’s face, says nothing, doesn’t even look at him, and drains the glass. Coldly, Benton takes it away, walking as if to the tiny communal kitchen near the Gemenon Traveller’s brig and nodding at his fellow guards. He reaches the kitchen, but instead keeps walking until he is out of sight and hides the glass in the bulk of his jacket.

 

He escorts the President to the airlock, and watches her as the Cylon in Ray’s form plays them all like a guitar. Watches Roslin and then Thrace fall under his spell, and then Roslin giving Thrace all the advice she needs. He suppresses the urge tell Kara Thrace everything she doesn’t need to know about that particular Cylon’s programming, where it likes to be touched, the kind of jokes it enjoys, how it takes its coffee in the morning.

 

He watches, unable to move, as terror passes over the Cylon’s face as he realises his fate. Forces himself to watch as the thing that looks like Ray is vented into space to its death.

 

He escorts Roslin back to Colonial One, terrified that Leoben would still be floating around the ships like forgotten trash, and as she takes call after call, and paces in stockinged feet, he packs all his feelings into a small box in his mind and waits to be dismissed.

 

He ends his day in his tiny, cupboard-like quarters, and lets himself place the glass hidden in his uniform on his shrine. A few remaining water droplets catch in the light from the eternally burning candles of the vigil for Ray’s immortal soul. The irony catches in Benton’s throat, the patently ridiculous notion that Ray, staunch agnostic, who mocked the trappings of religion and only went to temple when Benton bodily dragged him there on feast days, actually has an immortal soul, and probably is out there now, incarnated into a new body that looks just like his old one to continue his life where he left off.

 

He can’t quite bring himself to stop the vigil though. He keeps the glass as a place to hold the wax remnants and scrapings of the burned out candles, for want of something to do with it.

 

Benton thinks hysterical things at night, lit by the candles on the shrine. Every time a copy of the Cylon model two is dug up from a forgotten corner of the fleet, he feels a tug that maybe his vigil has bought Ray back to him.

When it turns out that each copy knows nothing, and then looks at him with that blank face as if he was not even a curiosity, sometimes he presses the button to vent the airlock himself.

 

That night, Benton dreams of running through endless corridors of identical men with Ray’s face, none of which are him. They eventually turn into lifeless staring copies of his own face. When he wakes up in a cold sweat, he cries, for the first time since the end of days.

 

Once, one of the copies, the one with the chunk missing from its ear, looks at him through the reinforced glass of the airlock and smirks. “I know you” he says. Benton’s heart stops. “He told us about you”, the copy says. He smiles. “I’ll tell him you said hello”. Then, as Benton rushes to the glass, the Major in charge of venting that day presses the button, and then glares at him, eyes narrow with suspicion.  

 

* * *

 

With all the movements of Colonial Day and the weeks that follow, it is decided that the President needs a dedicated security detail of non-military personnel. The President asks for him personally, remembering him from the Leoben case, and so he goes, trading in his tiny Galactica quarters for slightly larger ones on Colonial One, and trading the anonymous look of the layered tanks and blue Galactica uniform with the insignia removed for a suit that someone procured him that fit suspiciously well. He brings his candles and his little shrine, and sets it up in the corner of his room, in the only space where it’ll fit. Over the following weeks he gets a reputation for being a pious devotee to the gods, a bit of a prude, and an example of old-fashioned Aquarian manhood - upstanding, incorruptible and devoted.

 

He keeps a stolen picture of Leoben in between the pages of his copy of the scriptures. The book is small and well worn. Contrary to the beliefs of the crew on Colonial One, he never owned a personal copy of them before attending the academy. They were handed out on the first day by an affiliated religious group wanting to make sure the police were the right kind of spiritual, not taken with trendy monotheism or scandalous agostism. It had been bashed up for years in his bag as he moved from posting to posting, giving it the worn look of a pilgrim, though he had rarely cracked the spine apart from the win an argument with Ray about the precise wording of a parable.

 

Its not that he doesn’t believe, its just he never really had an opinion either way as to whether the gods exist, or whether the whole thing is moral code tied up in beautiful stories. He always believed that people who think the gods care about the tiny details of their lives have their perspective backwards.

 

He says this to the President one day, when she is talking about the discovery of Kobol and the fulfillment of the prophesy with stars in her eyes that frankly scare him. She smiled at him in that way she does sometimes, a little knowing, a little smug, and says that it is those who think they are insignificant whom the Gods care about most of all.

 

When later in the week he is standing on the front line of the scrum, unfamiliar gun held aloft in the face of the senior ranking members of the Colonial military, trying to prevent democracy from being destroyed because of what boils down to the President believing that she is doing the Gods’ work, it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise that things turned out this way.

 

* * *

 

The President is taken into custody in a military coup, and in the aftermath Benton requests transfer back to the main Colonial security force on Galactica. He throws himself into the task of being the perfect security officer - forcing himself into learning the names and faces of  everyone on all the ships, patrolling the ships themselves with every hour he can so he knows their every flaw, and mediating squabbles to bring himself back down, to ground himself in the gorgeous squalor that humanity has made for itself. The boredom of this life in limbo is almost as awful as when everything went horribly wrong. But Benton chose this life, chose to walk the corridors rather than stay in the security hall as a static force, with all the pictures of the humanoid Cylons staring down at him, forcing him to hide his grief as much as possible. The constant background level of terror and nausea that builds up when he spends time there, catastrophising about how if people found out that he was with a cylon back on Caprica he would be branded a conspirator and sent to the prison ship, or worse, forced out of the airlock to die, suffocating in the vacuum of space.

 

On one memorable patrol, a family breaks up right in front of him, the husband unable to take his feelings of impotence of this unearned sentence of life and takes his boiling rage out on his family. His wife is silent, her three children equally, devastatingly so. Benton takes the man away - resettles him on a brutal mining ship, and pulls some strings to get the mother and children some of the incredibly oversubscribed counselling and a relocation to quarters on a more family minded ship. They have a dog, a pup really, restless and still in his travel cage apart from short, secretly stolen walks in among the makeshift apartments on the hanger deck. An injury from unsecured cargo had left him deaf, and so the family was too scared to let him have the space he needs, for worry of him getting into trouble. The children pet him through the bars. The mother looks at him imploringly, and then at Benton, but doesn’t outright ask.

 

He names the dog after the infamous Aquarian Quorum representative from his childhood. Diefenbaker becomes a semi-celebrity in his own right, trotting through the ships as Benton goes on his rounds, a well behaved and fitting lieutenant to him. Diefenbaker proves himself to be fiercely intelligent and loyal to a fault, that fault being sweets.

 

* * *

 

Unrest across all the ships as the run up to the election begins gives Roslin cause to expand the civilian security presence across the fleet. On Galactica, Benton is promoted to become their formal leader, Sergeant, from the unofficial rank he had before. His fellow security officers had commandeered a former storage locker near the hangar bay emptied of its supplies by the necessities of war to act as their hybrid mess-rec room-office-hiding place. It still smelled a bit of engine oil, but as no one else wanted it, it was handed over without too much complaining.

Benton came back from patrol late in a shift to find his conscripts playing a game. The ambrosia was flowing, and someone had taken the Cylon headshots down from the wall. There’s a cheer about a second before he enters, and, face set to full butter wouldn’t melt, he enquires, in his polite, Sergeant Fraser tone, what is going on.

“Oh Sarge”, one of his new recruits smiles at him around her ambrosia glass, tongue stained bright green. “We’re playing frak, marry, kill, Cylon edition.”

There’s a clamour and she stands, holding her drink aloft, “I’d frak the blonde tall one with the bad clothes, marry the short one with the bad suits, and kill FRAKKING BOOMER!”

The whole security corps erupts into cheers as she downs her drink. Benton takes that opportunity to escape back out of the hatch before they felt obligated to ask him to join in and he had to give an answer that wasn’t Ray, Ray, Ray.

Ray, the first time they frakked, going from giggly to serious as Benton slid into him, his expressive face and strong body opening up and accepting him for everything he was. The ring that Benton had his eye on in the jewellers near the museum, made of the purest gold and thin as a line of solder, that he had almost finished saving up for when the attacks happened.

The vision of their apartment, blown apart, pictures fallen off the walls, the Aquarian indigenous artefacts that Ray pretended not to understand lying broken and Ray’s body, decomposing in the silent crypt of their life together.

 

Shaking slightly, he took a mildly grumbly Dief for another patrol round Galactica’s decks in order to clear his head.

 

* * *

 

Life on Galactica could quickly go from dismally boring and everyone in vaguely good moods for the apocalypse, to everything in a crisis and crazed.

 

The election breaks up the monotony, and for a while it looks like an easy re-election for Roslin. Baltar fumbles and faux-pas his way through the early campaign, showing himself up as the unprepared opportunist people suspected him of being. Then New Caprica was found, and Baltar stars making promise after promise about this land of milk, honey and DRADIS camouflage.

 

There is massive distrust in the crew of the Galactica, and so the military provide security, but trusted, reliable citizens are tasked with the count. People tend to like him, think he is one of the few honest security officers in the fleet, trustworthy and trusted with power but without the stain of military loyalty, and tend to listen to him a few percentage points more often than his fellow officers, and so he is asked to take part in the count. There is astounding turnout, the wireless is blaring in every room with talk shows arguing about whether people should vote Baltar or Roslin. Aquaria never had elections like this, everyone took their civil responsibility seriously, but in a quiet, small town way. Where fights broke out occasionally on Aquaria, in this case though, everything remained mostly calm. He thinks that his mother would have appreciated the way the civility and enthusiasm had been maintained on such a large scale.

 

The count is done is a cool, quiet room in the bowels of the flagship. His fellow returning officers are equally well respected people from around the fleet, and they politely nod at each other when they return from their mandated breaks.

He counts methodically over and over again, mentally noting how the ships are distributed across the political spectrum. It’s unsurprising that the ships with the worst quality of life, broken scrubbers, severe rationing and cramped quarters are overwhelming for Baltar and his promise of a new life on New Caprica.

 

As he performs the final count aboard the Galactica, Benton realises that for the first time in his life, he has forgotten to vote.

 

There is an audible sigh across the fleet when Roslin’s miraculous win is announced. The whole thing tastes bad in Benton’s mouth, like something out of a film, a third act surprise. There is a kerfuffle, and everyone is ushered to the sides of the room to wait for something to happen. Eventually, after much waiting, a new box is brought in. The Admiral, the co-ordinating lieutenant and a stern faced woman who is the highest judicial officer left in the fleet sit and count the votes in front of a dozen witnesses. When this count is over, Doctor Baltar has won the election.

 

* * *

 

Benton doesn’t want to go down to New Caprica. He knows that in his heart that he should, that he is a man of the outdoors, born to hike over glaciers and sleep rough under the stars, and that it would feel good to breathe something other than recycled air. He knows it would be in Dief’s best interests to be able to reconnect with nature. There are a thousand good reasons to do it, and yet he never quite gets round to putting in the paperwork.

There’s industry down there, small factories producing worthless goods, and while there aren’t many seeds to start off the agricultural revolution that needs to happen within the next few years to stop them all starving to death, people are still throwing themselves into it with gusto. He never wanted to be a farmer, or a factory worker. There is little to hunt and what passes for fish on the planet are strange spiky things that have nothing resembling edible flesh beneath their carapaces.

He stays on Galactica for as long as he is useful. The Admiral himself disbands the civilian security detail for good reason, as they lack a meaningfully sized civilian population. As he thanks them for their service, he shakes Benton’s hand and thanks him personally for his tireless work. Dief yips at him, and Adama smiles and pats his head.

A strange choice of word, Benton thinks, walking away to start packing. He is so tired he wants to dig himself a grave and sleep to death.

 

They move down to the surface to try and bring some peace. Benton gets a job with the union, drawn as usual to politics. He is offered a job by Baltar’s aide Gaeta, but he is sick of standing around looking menacing and lying to people to keep the peace. With the union, he feels that he can help.

 

He builds himself a cabin about a half an hour’s walk out of what passes for New Caprica city. He names it New Delphi.

 

The cabin has a wood frame, insulated and waterproofed with the tent given to him on landing. Fabric is scarce, and so he sleeps on the ground with nothing but Dief for heat while it is warm enough, this facsimile of summer, and gets enough together, eventually, for a bed. His remaining reformed candles shine on the shrine, keeping the place light and warm. He no longer continuously burns them, now they have purpose.

He thinks that it would be okay to die here.

 

Magical things happen under the grey New Caprican sky. Dief comes out of his shell and shows off his wit, intelligence and superior breeding and tears his way across the barren plains. He grows a winter coat and looks even more beguiling than usual. When they go into town, forgotten treats are produced from coat pockets from smiling ladies and the sticky hands of children.

 

The human colonists enjoy a year of something more than mere existence, life clinging on and beginning to flourish despite the grey skies and lacklustre crop yield. Seemingly every day babies are born, women who he knew as quiet and perpetually tired suddenly blossom and men who were bent in defeat suddenly start to stand tall again.

The celebration of the first year comes and it seems like maybe everything will be alright, and then it is a cruel twist that two weeks later the Cylons arrive, the president surrenders, and the scrap of blue sky clouds over once again.

 

* * *

 

For the few days after the occupation Benton heads out into the wilderness to scout out the wider picture of where the Cylons have landed and how far their reach goes. He traps some of the small round creatures with the long ears that they named rabbits, because creativity is one of the first things to disappear when times are truly dismal. They have a thick pelt and thicker skin, and like most things on the surface are mean, scared, hungry and above all, lean. They look curiously at Dief right up until the moment he pounces. There are few large mammals barring the swivel-eyed bovines that stand by the water on warm days, and so he isn’t immediately identified as a predator. Whether life evolved on New Caprica or the planet was seeded by the gods as part of their plan is something for the biologists and philosophers to ponder. Benton hunts to have something to barter, something for him and Dief to eat, but ultimately, for something to do.

 

A storm hits, or what passes for storms on New Caprica, low, penetrating rain that brings the biting cold down into the bones of the settlement and turns the weird dusty soil to a clinging mud. He turns back early, but he has seen enough, that the cylons are here, gleaming chrome and identical heads clustered deadly and sincere.

 

The cabin was built to be weather-tight but not burglar-proof. If anyone was desperate enough to trek this far out of the city to steal food then they are welcome to it in Benton’s eyes. He noticed immediately that the catch had been forced without care, and needs repairing. He lets himself in, sighing, as he had built it to break cleanly.

 

He stops short when entering the cabin. He hadn’t expected the intruder to still be there.

At first glance, it was a Cylon model two sat at his table. Dief growls and starts to bark, but then the model turns to Benton, looks at him and grins, eyes alight and there is a lump in Benton’s throat and tears in his eyes before he can get a word out. He closes the door and jamms the latch, locking Dief outside.

 

For a long moment, he cannot find his voice. “Ray”, he ends up croaking, barely audible against the storm and Dief’s barking fury.

 

Ray stands, and comes over to him. “Fraser”, he replies, and Benton cannot take being in the state of not touching him anymore. It has been nearly two years, no, be accurate, it has been 20 months and 27 days since the catastrophe, 22 months and 11 days since he last touched Ray, last kissed him, last felt that happiness that was now waking up inside him.

He runs his hands across Ray’s body. First lightly, as if he would turn into gossamer and dust if too much pressure was added, then when he doesn’t disappear into thin air, hard, pressing on muscles to feel his bones, to feel the structure of him beneath the impermanence of flesh.

  
Ray’s face is lighter than it used to be, paler, a face that has never sunned itself on the steps of the fountain in Delphi. His familiar eyes are there though, the look that was missing from all the doppelgangers, that look of relief.

 

“Fraser”, Ray whispers. His voice sounds new, like he hasn’t used it before.

 

Benton kisses him slow and deliberate then, with both hands on Ray’s face to feel him kiss back. The wonderful machine of Ray has strong jaw muscles and the same rough, patchy beard he remembers with his fingertips. Benton lets himself have this, this complicated, beautiful dichotomy of happiness and horror. Whatever anyone says about the Cylons and their immortality, this, this very kiss, this benediction, is the evidence of their individuality. He kisses Ray’s gorgeous mouth, feels his strength, that supernatural strength that can go down with the ashes of twelve worlds but still come back good as new.

 

Ray breaks away, already talking, words stumbling over themselves as he pours his whole story out. “I died, Fraser, I died and then I downloaded and then I had to answer questions about my cowardice, about my failings. About you. About how my love for you failed me, blinded me to God’s love, and forced me to forget about my mission. They weren’t wrong. I had my mission, and I left it derelict. And so I was punished.”

 

Benton had to kiss him again for everything unspoken within that statement. “I saw many of you, riddled through the fleet, mocking me” he says. “One of them said he had heard about me from you.”

“In the years I was in Delphi, I told my kind about everything, but my everything was you. They didn’t suspect that I had completely abandoned my mission until after it ended.”

“Things are different now. The war is seen as a mistake, and so my sins have been forgiven, and they allowed me to return. The Cylon are ready to live together with the human. The war is over. Your President surrendered, and the new age is here. This is the future we will build together”.  

Benton smiles, but cannot ignore the reflexive feeling of a sudden drop within his chest of dread and terror that the new world implies.

 

The cabin is big enough for two, and even though it is in the middle of nowhere news gets out that Benton Fraser of all people has shacked up with a Cylon and is a traitor. He loses his job with the union, which is fine as the Cylons ironically don’t want the humans collectivising anyway, and any discreet conversations he tries to join about the resistance he knows must be going on is rebuffed. He gives up picking up anything other than odd jobs, and refuses to work for the cylons doing anything that means subjugating his fellow humans. Working shoulder to shoulder with his fellow men and women in harsh, condemning silence is awful. No one ever asked why he shacked up so quickly with a Cylon. No one cares about the details when there is so much at stake.

 

* * *

 

Ray rarely goes into New Caprica City to make himself a target, and so someone breaks into the shack in the middle of the night and bludgeons him to death.

 

Benton wakes up warm and sticky, completely bone tired from a day shovelling effluent with a smile on his face, and so initially he thinks nothing of it. The smell is what does it, what cuts through his fantasy of being post-coital and back in Delphi on a warm Saturday morning, because there is blood everywhere. He opens his eyes and Ray is lying face down on the bed, and they are both covered in blood. The door lies on the floor, its hinges destroyed. Ray’s head is caved in, he is obviously dead and has been for a while. His body is covered in dirt - whoever ambushed him and bludgeoned him to death then dragged him back and laid him in their bed to make a point.

 

Benton rises, carefully, stepping around the bed to wash his face and let Dief out, and wraps Ray’s body in the ruined quilt. He then digs a grave. It takes hours, the hard ground of New Caprica lacking the easy give of its namesake’s verdant volcanic soil. His arms burn from the repetitive motion, but he wants to bury Ray deep, make it good, follow the burial rites that his Ray, the one with the tattoo on his arm and the scars seemingly everywhere telling a story in their silvery warp and weft, never had. The reborn Ray is a monotheist like the rest of his kind, the one thing Benton can definitely say is different from the undercover version of Ray he knew. When Benton speaks the funeral rites, he stumbles a couple of times, but manages to say ‘god’ instead of ‘gods’. He doesn’t know if the Cylons have a concept of death, seeing as their resurrection is a given, but this entire mess of exertion and ritual isn’t for the benefit of Ray’s soul anyway.

 

Ray returns the next day, having hiked from the Cylon base with supplies: food, more candles, and a new blanket made of the weird nubby silk material the Cylons favour. The freshly turned earth has the traditional cairn marking it, a bed of stones scrounged from this land that never was reclaimed from the ocean, a waystone as remembrance of returning man to earth as the scripture demands. Ray stares at it, pursing his lips and resolutely not saying anything. He helps Benton rehang the door, and then takes him back to bed.

 

Ray’s body is new, factory fresh and smells strange, like an unlived in room. Over time, it will wear off. The muscles lack anything other than superficial strength, and so Benton holds him down and kisses every inch of him, committing to memory the changes, the vanished scars, counting every mole and mark that confirms that this lover is physically identical to the last one. He begins to hyperventilate at that thought, and so Ray rolls them over, and repeats their old promises to each other, the silly little prophecies that turned out to be true, proving that he is who he is.

 

After they tire themselves out emotionally and physically, Ray whispers to him ‘If it happens again, burn my body. My mind is what matters, and I won’t ever forget you. I will come back from death for you, as long as you will have me.’ To this, Benton says nothing.

 

Ray is murdered three more times on New Caprica, and each time, Benton digs a grave, and each time, Ray comes back to him, rushing across the flat, dusty plain like the incoming tide.

 

* * *

 

Benton is in the market in the city when he runs into one of his former subordinates, Tom. Tom has a broad face and a paralysed lip that gives him a mean sneer even when laughing, which is a useful trait for a security officer with no power at the end of the world. They pause to catch up and people around them openly stare at Tom for speaking to a traitor. A hard faced man who Benton remembers once helping in a dispute spits at Benton’s feet. Tom is defiant, and shouts at the hard faced man that Benton ‘has his reasons’, and what about that son of his who was police? Tom says the word police the way people say child molester, rapist or traitor. The man scurries away, his face still purple with fury.

When Tom hugs him to say goodbye he whispers in Benton’s ear that the Galactica is coming back. “Be ready. They can come at any time. I do believe you have your reasons and wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t want to, but don’t tell your lover. There is so much about Cylons we don’t even know.”

 

Before the Galactica comes back the resistance turns their level of brutality all the way to inhuman. Frequent suicide bombs rip through the city, and in response masked death squads roam through the clusters of tents that make up the city’s residential area, and the whispers about the Galactica get louder and more terrified.

He doesn’t tell Ray any of the whispered stories he hears. Within the cabin they are living on borrowed happiness and stolen time, but there is just so much unknown about their relationship. He doesn’t know what Ray does during the time Benton is working - likely something akin to the penance that Benton has had to do. Ray has already been marked as a traitor, so they are in the same boat, but the Cylon have a way of making everything happen to their schedule, so who knows. Maybe they hook him up to a mainframe and download everything Benton has said to him in the last day as an insurance policy against future compromise.

Benton has never been a very good liar, at least not to Ray, but if he has noticed it he hasn’t said anything, which lends credence to the idea that they can lie about everything to each other, but each other.

 

The announcement of fire drill training is a sign that the rescue scenario is going to happen soon, and so they decide to bolster the cabin and make the garden a more serious endeavour. Oh, of course they argue about it. The chasm of grief in Bentons’ stomach threatens to overwhelm him, the thought of no longer being with Ray, of heading out into the blackness of space again and living in a cold rack without a warm body to come back to at the end of a long shift is unfathomable. They figure that in the best case scenario they could have a few years together, living on love and rabbits and whatever they manage to eke out the soil, and then maybe, if they’re very lucky, die happy, together.

 

He goes over what happened a thousand times in his head in the months after. Why they decided to do the final market run that day, and not the day before. The bombs go off as they’re apart, on either side of the market, hoping to make the trip as fast and as discreetly as possible. It is carnage, everything red with blood and black with choking smoke, and then there is the unholy sonic boom of the Galactica itself jumping into the atmosphere, and then it is chaos. Benton takes cover, and can only watch as everything, the human society of a year and four months is destroyed around him.

Ray is sheltering almost exactly diagonally across from him, a few short meters at the most. They make eye contact under the rickety trestle tables, and then run for it, keeping low as possible. Someone shouts, and there is the flash of a knife and Ray pitches forward into the mud, his throat cut wide open like a smile.

Benton screams, and before he completely checks out someone tackles him to the ground to save him from a bomb. He wakes up in a med bay, strapped to a bed with thick leather straps for his own protection, covered in wounds but still alive. The Galactica’s rescue mission had been a success, and there is not a trace of New Caprica out of the porthole window.

 

* * *

 

In the months that follow, Benton wonders about where the differences between cylons and humans actually lie. They are supposedly genetically near-identical to humans, but what is the difference, at the heart of it? A tiny transmitter in the frontal lobe? A shred of metal in the twist of DNA that together make the blood into a swirling electromagnet that powers the sophisticated bio-computer of their brain? Nobody can answer him this.

 

He is ostracised once back on the Galactica, and reclaims his place in the security force for a loss of idea of what else to do, but when he walks the halls of the fleet no one comes out to greet him, even when Dief noses his way to see old friends with secret stashes of sugar.

Civilian Security is always the second to last to know things, after the military, government, late night talk wireless presenters and support crew but at least before the general public, and so by the time talk of people being snatched and secretly condemned to death spreads enough the whole fracas is over, everyone who was on New Caprica is officially pardoned, and the line of the law stretches back over to the other side of the discussion.

 

Benton is doing a circuit for his legs and Dief’s sanity when he almost bumps into Lieutenant Barolay.

‘You’re lucky, traitor’, she spits, near inaudible above the hubbub of Galactica’s general stretch. ‘A pardon spares you for now’ lingers in the air. Everyone else in the busy hallway pointedly ignores the exchange.

 

He thinks about the encounter for days, about being spared a secret trial because, as it was whispered, he didn’t exactly help the Cylons. What he did was enough, but part of him, the angry, romantic part, wants to scream that he just fell in love with one. If somebody asked he would say that this love pre-dated the war, pre-dated time itself, as if that was a good enough excuse to fall in love across the hard-drawn lines of treason. But nobody did ask why. Nobody really talked to him much at all. Even Dief seemed a bit distant, sometimes.

 

* * *

 

There are whispers through the fleet, spreading fast from those with windows in their quarters to those without. Benton has a window, can see it with his own eyes that there is a basestar there, hanging in space among the fleet like it belongs.

There are Twos aboard the Galactica, gathered together like a pod talking about the rush of water and other existential things. Their lyrical muttering stops when he walks past, and yet Benton knows that the group doesn’t include Ray, that it couldn’t include Ray and not make a sound. He holds his head high with faith, secure in the knowledge that Ray will come to him the moment he is able.

 

It is the middle of his sleep cycle when there is a desperate pounding on his door. The phone is silent, the alert klaxons aren’t flashing and there is no sound of heavy boots on metal in the corridor that indicates that there is a crisis happening.

 

Benton is out of his rack and wrenches the door almost off its hinges before he is immediately barrelled into by Ray, and goes from sleep to fully aroused like an FTL drive engaging. Ray is in his arms, hard, all that Cylon strength being used to keep Benton where he needs him. They kiss ferociously, and Ray grabs the mechanism for the door and slams it shut, rolling fast on its guiderail and shaking the whole, tiny cabin like the world is ending again.

Ray grabs Benton’s hips and lifts him against the wall, and they kiss like that, so very slowly, everything like flowing treacle with Benton’s legs wrapped round Ray’s waist like he weighs nothing at all. Ray is fully dressed in standard number two fare, all ugly layers over a body that is strong and thick and capable. Benton is thinner these days, inhabiting a body that is weaker and tenser and far older than before. Ray peels him out of his clothes with care. The threadbare tank he sleeps in was Ray’s in another life, from one of the first gigs that Ray took Benton to, when they were still looking for reasons to spend time together. Their undressing is silent and reverent, the eye of the storm, but then the old wind picks up and they fall into the rack, and it is Benton who ends up sprawling on top, shoving himself into Ray with gun oil and whispered prayers to the gods, throwing his weight around, watching Ray grasp the thin, over bleached sheets away from the thin mattress as they frak hard. It can’t last long, but it can last long enough. Ray comes with a single touch, and gods, that feeling of someone coming on your cock, because of your cock, will never stop being Benton’s favourite thing in the known universe. Especially Ray, who laughs when he comes, like his orgasm is a cosmic joke that is the funniest, most joyful thing he’s ever experienced. Benton comes so hard his entire body spasms, muscles twitching like he’s been hit with an electric shock, everything buckling and he yells enough to rouse the whole deck.

 

Ray should leave. A Cylon, whatever the circumstances of this truce, shouldn’t be found in civilian quarters. Benton had worked hard to rebuild trust, to wash off the stink of being a suspected collaborator, but he lets himself have this, this post-coital intimacy that his body craves even more than the sex.

 

Ray drags himself away just as Benton is falling back to sleep and slips out of the door. Beyond curses and blasphemies, they haven’t said a single meaningful word to each other. When he wakes up, it could almost have been a wet dream, apart from the ache in his muscles and the rasp of his voice.

 

* * *

 

Resurrection is destroyed as part of this deal made between Cylon and man, bring death, the great leveller, to all beings in the fleet.

Ray seems faintly giddy about the whole thing, like the possibility of death is nothing more than a novelty. In the weeks that follow, they manage conversations in between bouts of insatiable sex where Ray scares him with his talk of reincarnation being a fast, provable fact, rather than a mere article of faith.

“Do you think I’ll be a woman, next time round?” Ray ponders. “Would you like my personality if it was a woman?”

“I’d like you if you were anything, Ray” Benton replies absently, moving sleepily to get out of bed and get dressed for his shift.

“Maybe you’ll be a woman too” Ray continues. “I bet you’d be pretty. Red-headed and stacked, yeah? I can see it now, I’m having a vision, no wait I take it back, you’re hideous, ahh, oh god -”

Benton hits him with the pillow. “I can never tell if you’re joking about visions but this time I know its a lie. I would make a lovely woman, I’ll have you know.”

 

They never get round to talking about it all that seriously, but losing Ray, this time for good, becomes the one thing that Benton cannot quite let go.

 

* * *

 

Its lucky that during the mutiny Benton is attending to a minor dispute on the Scylla and Ray is over on the Basestar when it starts. Benton tries to keep people safe as best he can, controlling the flow of damaging information and attempting to control expectations in the crowds that gather. One of his colleagues tries to get him to use their raptor to get back over to the battlestar and help ‘fight the good fight’. His face doesn’t say ‘save the status quo’, more the familiar gleam of ‘lets shoot some frakkers’, so Benton locks him in the raptor after removing the launch keys, and sets about keeping the peace as best he can.

 

By the time he gets back over to the Galactica the word has spread through the fleet that the Quorum are dead. After much arguing, finally the government is reformed in a way that accepts that the old world is gone, and government needs to reflect the new way of things. Benton rejects all the offers of becoming the representative for any number of small ships, and supports the designation of Captains as representatives with a sigh of relief.

 

The mutiny does clear the air, and the Cylons are grudgingly accepted as part of the fleet. Ray comes over officially, permanently, as part of the Cylon refit team on Galactica, reinforcing the ship as they go, deck by deck up into its heart.

They don’t officially move in together, but more often than not, if their shifts align, they take their meals in quiet seclusion away from the madding crowds and they sleep together, exhausted from the day, in Benton’s quarters. It’s still a secret thing, but it is a secret that is generally becoming more open. The danger is terrifying though, and Benton wants to push Ray away for his own good half the time, and the other half just never let him go anywhere alone. He makes sure he is always on the rota to supervise the Cylon crew, and only lets those of his team who are the least vengeful and homicidal to cover for him when he inevitably has to sleep.

Even with the refit, there are times when the creaking of the Battlestar’s weakening hull keeps them awake at night. Patching the cracks takes time, which is something they do not have the luxury of.

 

After their whole deck is closed off when a near hull breach almost takes out several families, Benton is surprised to be reassigned quarters on the officer deck. They are spacious and obviously absolutely so tangled up in strings and caveats he can taste the responsibility attached to them, but part of him is tempted to give in and set up a proper life with room to stretch out, to accept the gift handed to him as thanks for work hard done. He gives up their promised quarters though to a family with young children because he can’t bear their faces heading down into the chaos of Dogsville. He’s is after all, sleeping with the enemy, even if they are in a ceasefire. The Cylons will never stop being the enemy.

 

They take to bedding down in the newly sealed sections, forming a nomadic existence in amongst the stink of curing resin. Ray doesn’t complain, in a way that drives Benton absolutely mad. Ray would always fight about things that weren’t deathly serious, and Benton doesn’t want to accept the magnitude of what is happening, that his home is disintegrating and the world could turn against them at any moment. He keeps stoic, because they now have no safe place to fight and frak it out, but when Ray recommends applying to another ship for quarters, it is all too much to bear.

 

“We cannot risk it Ray. Even if another Captain does allow you to join the manifest, I cannot lose you again”, Benton shouts. “You always came back to me, and I never had to wait more than a few years, like that is no hardship at all, and okay, yes, it is better than the alternative and I am thankful for it, but you cannot resurrect again. I cannot place my happiness on the idea that your visions and the scripture is right and we will incarnate together through history. I am selfish. I want you in this lifetime, not just in the next, and I can’t risk that on the hope that someone won’t get frakked on ambrosia and stab you to death in our bed again.”

He feels himself start to break down under the stress of having this fight. Ray looks stunned and shameful, but Benton continues, not losing his momentum, “You have been murdered four times in front of me since the fall of the Colonies. I have had to bury you four times and now you cannot come back. I would bury you in the ground a thousand times, gladfully, but I can’t bury you for the last time in the vacuum of space. I cannot think that the Gods have given you back to me for this not to be for good. I am not ready to cross the river, and I will not kill myself to expedite it.”

Ray smiles weakly. “You’ve been listening to Baltar and my brothers a bit too much. What’s your big solution?”

Benton squares his shoulders. “We go to the Basestar. You will be safe there.”

 

* * *

 

Life on the basestar is strange, but there is plenty of space and the food is surprisingly good, so while he feels bad about it, moving there introduces a feeling of respite after a long period of suffering. Benton isn’t the only human there, there are Galactica staff who have been seconded there, but he is the only one there for love of a Cylon. This makes him a peculiar celebrity. The Cylon are obsessed with the concept of love, romantic, true, perfect love. It is sacred love, its required to do all the great things in life, make babies, conquer armies, bring about new ages. Sometimes the more snarky models make comparisons of him and Ray and the cylon golden couple, Helo and Athena, totting up all the ways they come up lacking.

 

Their talk of love and its accompanying look of sanctimonious piety grates after a very short amount of time, and so Benton gives in and tells some of the stories that he learned as a child, at the knees of his schoolteachers and grandparents. Mostly about Zeus and his obsession with transforming into animals and gusts of wind in order to frak lovely maidens and alluring boys, and how all the demigods were conceived in lust, deception and adultery, not love. The model Fives especially were interested in the complex, ancient Kobol theory of love and its four presentations. Eros and his arrows, especially. Benton gave up his job to move here, and so having a new career of trading philosophy and ancient history and making some of the cylons feel ever so slightly less sure of their moral absolution feels like a good trade off.

 

The other twos treat Benton like the wife you wish your brother hadn’t married, who keeps ruining family gatherings by her mere presence. They are superficially polite, but make pointed comments to each other when they know Benton is within earshot about ‘the future of the cylon race’, how ‘god moves in mysterious ways’ and ‘who are we to question god’s will’ while staring at Benton and then going back to making knowingly sexual comments about rivers. Years of experiencing the backbiting nature of diplomatic service prepared Benton for this, and so it didn’t really bother him much, but Ray was weirdly upset about it. The acceptance of his brothers meant a lot more to him than he let on. They ended up mostly socialising with the threes, fours and fives, who were generally a lot more accepting of their relationship, if a bit dull.

 

The battlestar is declared no longer fit to be the flagship, and then comes the deluge. Old familiar faces start appearing on the Basestar with boxes of belongings, getting lost among the identical rooms and marvelling at the space given to them.

 

The stripped out guts of the Galactica arrive and with them rumours. The basestar spreads rumours like wildfire, and so within an hour everyone knows that a rescue mission, volunteer only, has been proposed for Hera Agathon. Benton knows the moment that he tells Ray about it he will want to join up. They make it to Galactica to volunteer on the first transport back.

 

Ray is assigned to the hangar bay. He has the kind of engineering expertise that they need as the hangar bay may very well not make it out of this fight alive. As the skeleton crew prepares the vipers and raptors for launch, Benton joins the marines, a few old security comrades and some cylon centurions in being armed to the teeth, prepared to save the Galactica from boarding parties and give up their lives to save the girl. It is like something out of a fairy tale, an entire civilisation going to save one little girl from a horrible fate. It has the kind of nobility that Benton Fraser was always mocked for personifying.

 

The cylons board, swarming through the cracked hull. Pockets of fighting break out all over the ship, circling round to the CIC. Centurions are dropping hard, splintering under the force of the gunfire, but more keep coming. Bullets are ricocheting off the hallways in a rain of lead and shrapnel.

Benton is trapped in a corner surrounded on all sides by whizzing bullets and the dulled shine of blood-spattered chrome. A red-painted centurion takes the other side of the hallway, but it is failing to absorb bullets and it buckles and crashes to the ground. A calm comes over him. The mechanical clanking of the enemy echoes, untraceable, up the hall towards him. He tries to pray to the gods, appeal to their better nature, but the pantheon is blurry in his head and he forgets the right prayers.

The red pulsing light of the centurion’s eye has almost reached his hiding place when there is a burst of gunfire at the other end of the corridor. Opposite him, a grating slides out, and Ray appears like a vision, grinning widely and carrying a fistful of ammo cartridges and an adapted gun from a viper. He pulls Benton up by his shoulder into the maintenance shaft and closes the grate behind them.

 

It is cool, and dark, and he knows that he is bleeding from dings of shrapnel and maybe a stray bullet to the extremity, but there is no sound of fighting outside anymore and he is overcome with hunger, desire and the shock from adrenaline. He clings to Ray with all his body and laughs, and cries, and kisses him with a wet face and grasping hands. Ray says “if we die, we die together, okay? I don’t know the things to say, but we die together, we are reborn together, until the end of time” into his ear, and they stay like that until there is familiar plummeting feeling in Benton’s stomach as the Battlestar jumps away, and the war is finally over.

 

* * *

 

Earth is beautiful, more beautiful than any other planet he had ever seen. The sheer expanse of green everywhere is absolutely breathtaking. Dief gambols like a puppy at his feet, tearing off across the savannah only to swerve and run straight back, barking delightedly.

 

They settle on one of the large continents in the Northern Hemisphere. There is so much abundance here, the rivers silver with fish and land full of fat, strange animals that wander up to greet them with curious delight. The raptor drops them off in an area that has a carpet of wildflowers as far as the eye can see in one direction and the soaring vista of snow capped mountains that never fade in the other.

The planet seems built for them, as if the Gods really did want them to end up here. It has the wide variation of each of the twelve colonies, but in a single planet. There is already life here, so much life just bursting all around them, but no history. The planet is still struggling with impermanence, with hunger and instinct and new sentience, nothing to fall back on to inform what will happen next. They personally are unlikely to become part of history, unless the Cylons had that whole reproductive thing wrong, and unless the permafrost gets them they will become nothing but blood and bone for the flowers and scavengers, but Dief seems to be well on the way to fathering a whole new species of hybrid canine, and maybe that is enough of an achievement for a lifetime.

 

They build a new cabin, and prepare for snow.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Oh my god, this would never have been finished if not for the girls in the dS Virtual Bar, the Battlestar Wiki for saving me from having to rewatch too many bleak episodes, but obviously this is for my girl loreleyluna, who finished watching the series as I finished writing this. Written in the stars, bb!
> 
> Title is from Hawksley Workman's 'We will still need a song' which seems to be the soundtrack to all my dS fic attempts.
> 
> [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


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